Affichage and Publicis choose Basel as the new capital

Since January 3, the advertising industry has been puzzling over who is behind the "Switzerland elects a new capital" campaign. Now the cat is out of the bag: Affichage, which includes APG, is the client. It is following in the footsteps of its Angie Becker campaign and has once again caused a stir with the capital city campaign. The campaign was implemented by the agency Publicis. According to a press release, Affichage wanted to prove that mobile marketing can be carried out efficiently with the help of outdoor advertising. It was able to achieve maximum effect with a minimum of intensity, namely just 800 posters. In addition, the campaign was probably self-financing: the posters invited viewers to take part in an SMS voting for a fee of 50 centimes. According to Affichage, the campaign demonstrates integrated outdoor advertising opportunities and the interaction of the classic poster medium with modern SMS communication. Implementation by Publicis Affichage commissioned the advertising agency Publicis with the communicative implementation. With the idea of packaging the case as a political election campaign, Publicis wanted to combine three objectives, according to the press release: to do justice to the advertising media used, to appeal to a broad public and to arouse the curiosity of journalists and opinion leaders. The campaign led to numerous speculations in blogs, comments and letters to the editor in newspapers or interviews with city presidents. All of this was conducive to voter turnout, especially as the federal government intervened. Firstly, the Federal Chancellery criticized the use of the Swiss coat of arms and secondly, it called on all federal employees to boycott the election.
Lucerne on the running board The Neuehauptstadt.ch website shows that a good idea always attracts riders to the running board. It differs from the "real" election website only by the absence of a hyphen; the URL carried by Affichage is www.neue-hauptstadt.ch. Anyone who accidentally enters the imitation address ends up on the official website of the city of Lucerne.
Basel wins The participants in the SMS voting were in a neck-and-neck race: With 42.4 percent of the votes, Basel won by a wafer-thin margin ahead of Zurich with 41.9 percent. Bern achieved 13.7 percent and Geneva only 2.9 percent. So it seems that the campaign did not have the same resonance in French-speaking Switzerland as on our side of the language border. Voting ends at midnight on January 14.
Net proceeds to Surprise Incidentally, the net proceeds from the SMS voting will be donated to Surprise, Basel's crisis-hit street magazine. The detailed evaluation of the interactive campaign will be made available to all interested parties in due course. The Psychological Institute of the University of Zurich is preparing its own study based on this data.